Your Family Culture can be imagined as a five-pointed star: the first four points ( the arms and legs of the star ) make a foundation for Discipline, the “head” of the star. Think about it like this:

Point One: Family Rhythm ~~ Create daily and weekly rhythms that are simple, slow and nourishing. Slow down and let your whole family b-r-e-a-t-h-e! Set your goal to celebrate yearly festivals in a conscious, non-rushed or media-influenced way.

Point Two: Family Work and Family Play ~~ Model for your child work-sharing: show them the “how-tos” in accomplishing the work-load a family requires. Remember: slowly over the years, hand more and more responsibility to them, as they develop more capacity. But don’t forget that families need to Play! Think of weekly play-together days and yearly get-aways for play!

Point Three: Children’s Art and Stories ~~ Give your child plenty of time and space for artistic exploration. No, you don’t need to enroll her in art classes, just make simple open-ended art materials available for her self expression: crayons ( buy 100% organic beeswax Filana crayons! ) paper, watercolor paint, modeling material, scissors, tissue paper, glue; you get the idea? And remember good stories are nourishment for the imagination, just like good food nourishes the body!

Point Four: Child’s Play ~~ Be sure your indoor play-space is full of imaginative possibilities. Choose toys and play materials that are open-ended. If the toy “plays itself” or talks to your child, it is not open-ended enough. Think of old-fashioned toys: wooden blocks, simple soft dolls, child sized kitchen toys, dress-ups, wooden wagons and plenty of empty baskets. Empty boxes, as we all know, are the very best! Be sure your outdoor space has plenty of exploratory possibilities!

Point Five: Discipline ~~ When all of the above are well taken care of, many discipline problems disappear. What to do when all is in-order and discipline is still needed? The watchwords here are Firm and Kind! Use simple non-emotional statements. Breathe slowly, settle into your heart-space, speak slowly. Allow yourself to “slip inside your child’s skin”, to understand the situation from their point of view. With this insight, firmly and kindly insist. You can do this, and you will love it!

I will be at The River Valley Waldorf School in Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania this Friday night talking about Family Culture. Join us there! www.rivervalleyschool.org 610-982-5606

I am so happy to invite you to join me for the Foundations of Healthy Brain Development Workshop at Acorn Hill this coming weekend! Acorn Hill Children’s Center was instrumental in my years of training and has always been a beacon of light for many teachers in our work with small children.

Check out the information below and join me for this opportunity to learn more about how to support the fullest brain development for your child. As Adele Diamond, developmental cognitive neuroscientist says…

“Want to encourage the best academic outcomes for your child? It is simple: Nourish their spirit!”

For the young child especially, but for all children as well, it is a rich life-lesson to experience “whole process” learning. We live in a fast-paced, fragmented world. With the SOLs and Kindergarten Boot Camp looming large on our national landscape, when does a child have the opportunity to take a field trip to the apple orchard, bring the apples “home” to school, process and cook them into apple butter to eat, weekly, on their home baked bread? Or plant bulbs in the fall, and jump for joy as they peek through the late winter snow. Activities as simple as working day after day on the apple butter, or using growing muscles to dig a bed for an autumn bulb….then sweetly forgetting all winter long….only to be amazed by early crocuses, teach endurance, patience and the reward of caring-for. The young child learns it is good to live in a strong body, to work and care for the earth and oneself. And to share this sense of goodness with those we love. The buzz-word these days is self-regulation, but we just call it a healthy childhood.

One of The Rose Garden parents sent me this photo yesterday. The exquisite beauty of the young child’s connection to nature is so evident: these brothers are free and at-large in the woods….living a life larger than the confines of their small bodies. They are as large as their own imaginations, at home in the forest. I am reminded of something I wrote years ago, as I prepared to write Heaven on Earth:

“I have found in my many years of teaching young children, and in my years as a mother of young boys, that most children are happiest at play outdoors. Young children are close to the realm of nature because they are still very natural beings. Because their consciousness is not yet separated from the environment, because they still live in the consciousness of oneness, of unity, they belong still to the natural world. In time they will belong to themselves, as the process of individuation becomes complete. But for about the first seven years, they are still at one with the world they inhabit. The process of separating from the parents and from the environment buds only around age seven. Before that, the child is moved along by life, something like the way a tree’s leaves dance in the breeze. The young child responds to the environment in a very unself-conscious way, a very natural way, and the open, complex, and diverse environment of the outdoors gives him that opportunity. If, in his excitement at a butterfly, he needs to dance and pirouette dizzyingly around the garden, no one has to say, “Be careful of the table.” If he needs to shout for glee or weep for sorrow, he is free.”

Through play in the natural world, we give our child thegift of freedom, tethered by and rooted in a deep visceral relationship. Is that not the fundamental balance humanity strives for? Such joy!

“How does the world work, and how do I fit into it?” This is the daily, living question of the young child. We can allow plenty of time and plenty of space for our children to wonder, to explore, to experiment, to keep trying, to learn. And isn’t much of learning discovering the right questions to ask? In this way, the questions remain alive; the “answers” are part of an on-going process. When we allow this hands-on exploratory learning, and do not limit the questions or answers with our linear adult concepts, the children learn in the same way Mother Nature herself learns: through scaffolding, or “serial functional progression.” The answers become a platform for the next set of really interesting questions. Our children experience themselves as avid students of life.

In these photos we see the Universe hard at work: How many stumps, boards, bricks and pine cones does it take to make the see-saw go down and the children go up? How do “up and down” operate, and what is the relationship between stumps, elbow grease and results? And what might be the relationship between the big black bugs and the small brown one (in the blue bowl)? When we learn to live the questions, life is rich!

Hello, friends! It is September and school has begun again. The children are full of joy to be back into the simple warm rhythms; enfolded by this rhythmic flow, they grow more fully into themselves. Here is what one parent wrote me about the bridge her child has built between home and school:

“The school day doesn’t just stop when the day is over. Greer plays school whenever she is at home as well. At home she gets the chance to be the teacher. She sets up our living room like the living room at The Rose Garden. Moving the coffee table and couches so that the space is just right. She brings in her own chair along with a cup of tea and some crackers. She sets her babies up in a semi circle around her so everyone can see and then she begins to “read” her story always starting with the chime of the bell which at our house is the clinging of silverware. She then sips on her tea as she tells her story with a big (all words) book in her lap.

When the time for resting comes up she prepares by laying all the colored silkies around the room and placing each baby it the appropriate place. She covers them says sweet words to them and gives each a gentle rocking motion to help the fall asleep. Once everyone is satisfied she goes to her chair and has a sip of tea.

Watching this take place in my own living room gives me a sense of satisfaction and pure joy. What my husband and I are giving our youngest of three is a treasure that is molding her into the gentle and kind human-being that we had hoped for when we decided to become parents.

Thank you to Sharifa and Rebecca for keeping us grounded in what really matters in life. The innocence and love our children bring us everyday.” Shannon

And thank you, Shannon, for sharing this with us! These rhythms create the foundation for a lifetime. During the summer, I had the pleasure of talking, on separate occasions, with two of my former students who are now college students. Each young woman told me how deeply her early years had formed and shaped her. The years spent in this forest busily building “homes” for insects & feeding the birds as well as singing, painting, playing and listening intently to stories had given them a deep love for the world, and also a beginning direction in their future work. One young woman is studying environmental law and she said she paints for pleasure, while the other is a poet as well as environmental activist.

The environment of our home gives shape to the young soul; let us be joyful for this gift, as we go about our “daily round!”

In agricultural societies, winter is the time to think-through and plan for the future. Decisions regarding which crops to continue, which fields to allow to remain fallow, and new seeds to experiment with are at the forefront of farmer’s minds. Today, as I watch the snowfall just outside my window, I also am thinking of seeds for the future. I am pleased to invite you to join me and others who contemplate our best future, to the March 4 -6, 2011 conference Re-Thinking Childhood: Parenting and Educating Children in a Time of Global Transformation hosted by Great Lakes Teacher Training, Milwaukee, WI.

Joan Almon, Executive Director of The Alliance for Childhood and I will keynote the conference. We will work with a host of workshop presenters who will offer topics for educators, parents, community leaders and all forward thinking people. This is from the brochure:

“Our world has been changing rapidly. We see transformation on a global scale in the fields of technology and science, in our natural environment and farms, in the economy and politics. It’s hard to even imagine the future our children will be entering into as adults. How can we best prepare them for the unknown? What experiences do they need to grow into adults who know themselves and have a sense of purpose? Can we imagine forms of education and childcare that support the development of meaningful relationships as a foundation for new and better ways of life”

On a final note, here is a thought from one of my up-coming presentations:

Those of us who are committed to the future ask ourselves a critically important question:“What is the best thing I can do, for the children?”But I would propose that we consider another equally critical question:“Who is the best person I can be, for the children?”How can I become my very best self?Who we are is the subtext our children read while we live each day with them, as we go about our “doing.”

It is our consciousness, knowing who we are, that shapes our children and the future as well.Raising and educating our children to know themselves prepares them best for whatever the future may hold.For it is in knowing ourselves, that we hold the compass which guides our actions.When we know who we are, we will know what to do.

Virginia has had a very cold winter so far: many, many days the temperature is below freezing, and plenty of days in the 20’s. This has not phased The Rose Garden children, as we play in the woods! As Helle Heckman says: “There is no such thing as bad weather, there is only bad clothing!” Equipped with woolie long johns, plenty of layers, snow suits even with no snow, and snug hats and mittens, the children have flourished in the cold. “But why,” you ask, “send them out in such weather?” It is hard to convey the importance of Nature, in the development of young children.

I wrote an article that was recently published in the Winter edition of Rhythm of The Home (click on Connections) a beautiful on-line magazine that you will want to visit. These are beginning thoughts on outdoor play: ” Outdoor play offers the child the opportunity to step into the long slow rhythms of the earth. The child readily comes to know their own bodied-ness when in intimate connection to the body of the earth. Running, swinging, jumping, creeping, sliding, kneeling, splashing, digging…all of this develops familiarity with and fullness “in the body.” The child develops strength, balance, agility, grace, flexibility, competence and confidence. This kind of “body-knowing” lays a foundation for all of these qualities to permeate the child’s whole being. Years later, the young person steps into the world with these capacities intact and readily available for the challenges and joys of adult life”

Here is a little more from an article of mine to be published in the Rhythm of the Home spring issue:

“Much research has been done, observing children’s play in both natural spaces, and in “built spaces”Studies show that children engage in more creative play in green areas than in built spaces.One study observed children playing in both “vegetative rooms”, (little forts and such that he children had built themselves)and in playgrounds dominated by play structures.They observed that children playing on the formal play structures grouped themselves in hierarchical subsets, dependent upon physical abilities.Whereas the children playing in the natural vegetative rooms used more fantasy play and their social standing was based more on language skills, creativity and inventiveness”.

Language skills, creativity and inventiveness abound when children are given plenty of creative play time; time to run and frolic held in the arms of our Mother, the Earth!

Winter has arrived on The Rose Garden playground and the children are ready to play! But what you see here is not all fun and games: according to a CNN article yesterday, the learning that takes place in childhood through the magic of creative play serves them not only on the playground, but in their Harvard classrooms. The following article by Erika and Nicholas Kristakis, of Harvard, highlights how the ability to control impulses, which is learned in play, serves the young adult in their future endeavors. The operant words in the article are “constructive, teacher (adult) moderated play”. Children certainly learn from their interactions with each other, but they need an adult close by to help them know how to move through the rough spots. Here is an excerpt from the article; you’ll see your child’s play in a new light!

“One of the best predictors of school success is the ability to control impulses. Children who can control their impulse to be the center of the universe, and — relatedly — who can assume the perspective of another person, are better equipped to learn.

Psychologists calls this the “theory of mind”: the ability to recognize that our own ideas, beliefs, and desires are distinct from those of the people around us. When a four-year-old destroys someone’s carefully constructed block castle or a 20-year-old belligerently monopolizes the class discussion on a routine basis, we might conclude that they are unaware of the feelings of the people around them.

The beauty of a play-based curriculum is that very young children can routinely observe and learn from others’ emotions and experiences. Skills-based curricula, on the other hand, are sometimes derisively known as “drill and kill” programs because most teachers understand that young children can’t learn meaningfully in the social isolation required for such an approach.

How do these approaches look different in a classroom? Preschoolers in both kinds of programs might learn about hibernating squirrels, for example, but in the skills-based program, the child could be asked to fill out a worksheet, counting (or guessing) the number of nuts in a basket and coloring the squirrel’s fur.

In a play-based curriculum, by contrast, a child might hear stories about squirrels and be asked why a squirrel accumulates nuts or has fur. The child might then collaborate with peers in the construction of a squirrel habitat, learning not only about number sense, measurement, and other principles needed for engineering, but also about how to listen to, and express, ideas.

The child filling out the worksheet is engaged in a more one-dimensional task, but the child in the play-based program interacts meaningfully with peers, materials, and ideas.

Programs centered around constructive, teacher-moderated play are very effective. For instance, one randomized, controlled trial had 4- and 5-year-olds engage in make-believe play with adults and found substantial and durable gains in the ability of children to show self-control and to delay gratification. Countless other studies support the association between dramatic play and self-regulation.

Through play, children learn to take turns, delay gratification, negotiate conflicts, solve problems, share goals, acquire flexibility, and live with disappointment. By allowing children to imagine walking in another person’s shoes, imaginative play also seeds the development of empathy, a key ingredient for intellectual and social-emotional success.

The real “readiness” skills that make for an academically successful kindergartener or college student have as much to do with emotional intelligence as they do with academic preparation. Kindergartners need to know not just sight words and lower case letters, but how to search for meaning. The same is true of 18-year-olds.

As admissions officers at selective colleges like to say, an entire freshman class could be filled with students with perfect grades and test scores. But academic achievement in college requires readiness skills that transcend mere book learning. It requires the ability to engage actively with people and ideas. In short, it requires a deep connection with the world.

For a five year-old, this connection begins and ends with the creating, questioning, imitating, dreaming, and sharing that characterize play. When we deny young children play, we are denying them the right to understand the world. By the time they get to college, we will have denied them the opportunity to fix the world too.”